Adventures of an Anti-Hero

February 13, 1961

In addition to her function as aesthetic
conscience of the Western world,
France has always been a pioneer in
moral matters. I don’t mean things like
the so-called “French farce,” which has
as little relevance to French life as to
anyone’s; I mean, for instance, the fact
that Madame Bovary was published in the same year as Little Dorrit and three
years before The Marble Faun. The
French continue to explore in both
areas. Much of the result can be written
off as mere excursion, like dadaism
and the anti-novel, still they do it.

The penalty of this virtue is high
expectation, which is why the much discussed
New Wave of French films
has been disappointing. Although several
good films emerged from it, it has
been more a Young Wave than a new
one. But now, with the appearance of
Breathless, we have a film that is new,
aesthetically and morally.

With the appearance of
Breathless, we have a film that is new,
aesthetically and morally.

The director—whose film this is in a
way that no American film belongs to
its director—is Jean-Luc Goddard, who is 30 and who wrote the screenplay
from an idea suggested by Francois
Truffault, director of The 400 Blows.
This is Goddard’s first full-length film,
and it quickly establishes that he has a
style of his own and a point of view.
He tells here the story of a restless,
dissatisfied young man, and his camera
follows the protagonist about like a
puppy, wheeling and reversing and
crowding up close; switching abruptly
(without dissolves) as abruptly as the
young man himself loses interest in
one matter and goes on to the next.
Form and subject are perfectly
matched in this work.

That subject is the anti-hero—not to
be described by the favorite cavil
word “amoral” but immoral and living
in an immoral world. He may have got
there because of his revulsion or our
exclusion of him, but that is where he
now lives by upside-down standards.
Already familiar to us through numerous
works from Jairy through Celine
to Camus, he now- appears on the
screen: stealing, mugging, murdering—and engaging us. We do not bleed for
him as the child of uncongenial parents
or as an underprivileged waif. He
is not to be cured by any of the cozy
comforts of psychoanalysis or social
meliorism. The trouble with this young
man, although he doesn’t specifically
know it, is history. If we understand
him, it is because we know that he is
contemporary society in extremis: that
the dissolution of religious foundations
and conceivable futures are in him carried
to the ultimate, short of suicide.
Yet this film is not a bid for sympathy,
it is an assault on those who
can be lulled by thinking that the leak
is at the other end of the boat and
anyway we’re only one-quarter under water. The film says, as have many
French novels and plays, that if we
concentrate on hoping for a revival of
the past, we will all drown. What we
must find is another boat—and what
it is, Goddard presumably doesn’t
know, any more than the rest of us;
but (to change metaphors) at least he
knows that it is fatal to cling to the
bosom of the dead mother just because
she is not yet stone cold.

The story of the film is simple: it is
one long flight. Michel, a young Parisian
drifter, steals a car in Marseilles,
kills a policeman who follows him,
hides out in Paris with an American
girl (pregnant by him) while he tries to
collect money owed for past thefts so
that he can run off with her to Italy;
finally is shot by the police while
running away and continues to run—down the unheeding street—until he
dies at the corner.

The style is all. The first two minutes
make you think this is going to be a
breezy Gallic comedy about crooks. A
shapely girl-accomplice signals Michel
when to snatch the car. Then, as he
speeds out alone through the country,
he sings, talks to himself, comments
on the beautiful weather, finds a pistol
in the glove compartment, plays with
it as he drives, going “pop!” at the sun.
He is soon cornered by a policeman
and the gun does in fact go “pop,” but
the actual shooting is not much realer
to Michel than the pretended one. This
playful violation of the bases of civilized
behavior is typical of the film.

It may not be
your truth, but that, of course, is not
the primary point.

Although it exists in an anti-conventional
world and although Michel’s
hero is Humphrey Bogart, this is not a hard-boiled film. It is the epic of a
romantic outlaw, as egocentric as romantics
and outlaws always are, whose
life seems the only natural one to him.
It is a film of flawless consistency and
uncompromised truth. It may not be
your truth, but that, of course, is not
the primary point.

Jean-Paul Belmondo, a young ex-boxer,
makes his debut as Michel and,
within film requirements, demonstrates
that he is a capable actor: that is, he
has imagination, sensibility, and the
ability to behave credibly. Jean Seberg, of unblessed memory, is his American
girl, and is quite adequate. Goddard
sensed that her personal quality (not
her actress quality) was exactly right for the part and has helped her get into the film.